The following is the text of a presentation given by Carlos Martinez to the Fourth World Congress on Marxism, which took place on 11-12 October 2025 at Peking University (PKU), China, organised by PKU’s School of Marxism.
The presentation gives an overview of the progress made by China in recent years with regard to clean energy, and poses the question: why is it China, rather than the advanced capitalist countries, that has emerged as the world’s only ‘green superpower’? Carlos argues that the fundamental reason lies in China’s economy being “structured in such a way that political and economic priorities are determined not by capital’s drive for constant expansion but by the needs and aspirations of the people.”
On the other hand, “the balance of power in capitalist countries is such that even relatively progressive governments find it very difficult to prioritise long-term needs of the population over short-term interests of capital.”
Carlos notes that, as a result of its systematic investment in renewable energy, electric vehicles, transmission systems, batteries and more, China has become the first country to meaningfully break the link between economic development and greenhouse gas emissions. “While governments in the West justify inaction on climate on the basis that it would harm economic growth, China is the first country to make the green transition a powerful driver of economic growth, thereby addressing both the immediate needs of the Chinese people for modernisation and the long-term needs of humanity for a habitable planet.”
China’s progress is set to have a profound global impact. As a result of Chinese innovations and economies of scales, there has been a global reduction in costs, such that for much of the world, solar and wind power are now more cost effective than fossil fuels.
And for those of us in the advanced capitalist countries, where political power is dominated by a decaying bourgeoisie, China’s example can be used to help create mass pressure to stop our governments and ruling classes from destroying the planet, and to encourage sensible cooperation with China on environmental issues.
The Congress featured an impressive array of Marxist academics and authors, including Gong Qihuang, President of Peking University; Li Yi, Vice President of the Party School of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China (National Academy of Governance); John Bellamy Foster, Editor-in-Chief of Monthly Review; Cheng Enfu, Professor, School of Marxism, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences; Radhika Desai, Professor, University of Manitoba; Roland Boer, Professor, Renmin University of China; Pham Van Duc, Professor, Vietnam Academy of Social Sciences; and Gabriel Rockhill, Professor, Villanova University. The Congress has been reported on CGTN, including brief video interviews with Carlos Martinez and Radhika Desai.
We will never again seek economic growth at the cost of the environment. (Xi Jinping)
There is a prevailing prejudice in the West that China is a climate criminal – the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases, and a country that continues to build coal-fired power stations. This connects to a wider perception of socialist governance as being antithetical to environmental protection.
And yet China’s remarkable progress over the last two decades in tackling pollution, protecting biodiversity and developing clean energy is causing this narrative to fall apart.
China has recently passed a historic milestone in its energy transition: cumulative installed solar capacity has exceeded 1 terawatt, representing 45 percent of the global total and far outstripping the United States and European Union.
At the United Nations climate summit in September, President Xi Jinping announced that China was committing to cut carbon dioxide and other pollution by at least 7 to 10 percent by 2035 – the first time that China has set a concrete target for reducing emissions as part of its Nationally Determined Contributions under the Paris Agreement.
Credible evidence suggests that China’s greenhouse gas emissions have already peaked, five years earlier than promised.
Since 2013, China’s solar installed capacity has increased by a factor of 180, while wind power capacity has grown sixfold.
China dominates the global green technology supply chain, producing the overwhelming majority of solar modules, wafers, and battery components.
A crucial counterpart to the rise of clean energy is the steady decline of coal’s share in China’s power mix. At the beginning of the 21st century, around 80 percent of China’s electricity was generated from coal; now it stands at around 50 percent and is steadily falling. Although new coal plants continue to be built, these are primarily advanced, efficient replacements or serve as backup capacity to stabilise renewable supply.
China produces two-thirds of the world’s electric cars and over 95 percent of its electric buses. It has more high-speed rail miles than the rest of the world combined.
China is the world leader in clean tech innovation, by quite some distance. It holds 75 percent of global clean energy patents, up from just 5 percent at the beginning of the century.
On forestation, China is again a world leader, its forest coverage having doubled from around 12 percent in the 1980s to over 24 percent today.
In summary, China is making remarkable progress towards its expansive and long-term vision of an ecological civilisation – promoting balanced and sustainable development directed towards the harmonious coexistence of humanity and nature. This vision is based on an understanding that, in the words of President Xi Jinping, “humankind can no longer afford to ignore the repeated warnings of nature and go down the beaten path of extracting resources without investing in conservation, pursuing development at the expense of protection, and exploiting resources without restoration”.
And increasingly, environmentalists around the world are looking to China as a model for how to address the climate crisis. Former UN Under-Secretary-General Erik Solheim, for example, describes China as “the indispensable country for everything green”.
Failure of capitalism
The science is clear and widely accepted: human industrial activity, most importantly the burning of fossil fuels, has increased the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere to an unprecedented level. This has led to more heat being trapped within the Earth’s atmosphere, resulting in a global heating effect which leads to more frequent and severe weather events, rising sea levels, wildfires, crop failure, fatal heatwaves, biodiversity loss, pandemics, and shifts in ecosystems.
Greenhouse gas concentration will continue to increase, and the corresponding ecological problems will get significantly worse, unless we either reduce our consumption of energy to an extraordinary degree or we switch to non-emitting forms of energy. The idea of reducing humanity’s overall energy consumption is obviously not plausible in a global context where billions of people need to consume more energy in order to meet their development needs. We must firmly reject the Malthusian fantasy that the Global South should be denied the right to develop; that the advanced countries should pull the ladder of modernisation up behind them.
Thus the only realistic option for preventing climate breakdown is to undertake a massive global transition to green energy: to meet humanity’s energy needs without releasing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and without causing permanent damage to the environment.
Since the early 1990s there has been a global consensus on this question, and yet progress in the advanced capitalist countries has been shockingly limited. Indeed, these countries maintain fossil fuel subsidies, they continue to expand drilling for oil and gas, and of course they engage in ecologically ruinous military activities. Inasmuch as they have reduced their greenhouse gas emissions, it has been achieved largely through exporting industry to manufacturing powerhouses in the Global South – principally China.
The economic anthropologist Jason Hickel has written that “the past half-century is littered with milestones of inaction… International climate summits – the UN Congress of Parties – have been held annually since 1995 to negotiate plans for emissions reductions. The UN framework has been extended three times, with the Kyoto Protocol in 1997, the Copenhagen Accord in 2009, and the Paris Agreement in 2015. And yet global CO2 emissions continue to rise year after year, while ecosystems unravel at a deadly pace.”
Mainstream political and economic discourse in the West has been dominated by the notion that “markets will fix everything”, consistent with the neoliberal paradigm that has reigned supreme for the last several decades. The forces of supply and demand were supposed to bring about a green transition, as fossil fuels became more expensive and renewables became cheaper.
Since this has failed to materialise, another neoliberal fantasy has taken hold: that individual consumers can save the planet by changing their lifestyles. We only have to drive electric cars, eat less meat, recycle more, fly less, take shorter showers, and so on. The crisis is thereby individualised, and the capitalist system is absolved of all responsibility.
The Trump administration has dropped even the merest pretence of participating in humanity’s shared struggle to keep Earth habitable. A couple of days before Xi Jinping’s announcement at the UN Climate Summit, Trump called climate change “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world”, and claimed that the shift to renewable energy was a hoax designed to support Chinese exports.
The Biden administration was at least better at a rhetorical level, but in reality prioritised its geopolitical confrontation with China and Russia – and service to the largest of corporate capitals – above international cooperation on environmental issues. Under Biden, the US placed sanctions on Chinese solar panels and polysilicon, as well as imposing huge tariffs on Chinese EVs. The proxy war against Russia has provided an extraordinary shot in the arm for the shale gas sector in the US. This gas is extracted via hydraulic fracturing – itself a dangerous process – and is then cooled to minus 70 degrees celsius in order to liquify it, whereupon it is shipped across the Atlantic Ocean. An ecological absurdity.
Meanwhile the US military is the largest emitter of greenhouse gases of any institution on Earth. If it were a country, it would rank 47th globally in emissions, ahead of Sweden and Portugal.
The lack of progress in the West is inexcusable, and the blame must be pinned on a capitalist system that privileges profit over planet. When a society is organised primarily around the pursuit of private profit; when an economy is oriented near-exclusively towards the production of exchange values rather than use values; the question of saving the planet will never be top of the agenda.
The solution: socialism
The balance of power in capitalist countries is such that even relatively progressive governments find it very difficult to prioritise long-term needs of the population over short-term interests of capital. Meanwhile in China, John Bellamy Foster points out that “everywhere and at all levels there are enormous efforts being made to restore the environment.”
Bellamy Foster continues: “While China has made moves to implement its radical conception of ecological civilisation, which is built into state planning and regulation, the notion of a Green New Deal has taken concrete form nowhere in the West. It is merely a slogan at this point without any real political backing within the system.”
The fundamental reason is that China is, in the words of President Xi’s report to the 20th National Congress, “a socialist country of people’s democratic dictatorship under the leadership of the working class based on an alliance of workers and farmers; all power of the state in China belongs to the people.”
China’s economic system is structured in such a way that political and economic priorities are determined not by capital’s drive for constant expansion but by the needs and aspirations of the people. The government, state-owned enterprises, cooperative and private companies all work together in the shared ecosystem of a socialist market economy, regulated by the state and adhering to a high-level plan.
The largest banks are state-owned, meaning that the most important decisions concerning allocation of capital are made in the long-term interests of the people.
China’s enormous investments in renewable energy, energy efficiency, electric transport, afforestation, batteries, electric transmission, nuclear energy, circular waste management and so on have largely been made by state banks, and many of its largest projects carried out by state-owned enterprises.
Italian-American economist Mariana Mazzucato has written that “what is separating China from its international peers is its courage to commit to renewable energy and innovation in the short and long run”. This captures something important in terms of China’s leadership, but “courage” is not actually the central issue here; rather, it’s a question of political power. Professor Hu Angang gets to the heart of the matter: “The capitalist development model has a fundamental and irreconcilable contradiction between infinite capital expansion and limited natural resources”.
In the West, fossil fuel companies exert an alarming level of political influence. Major oil firms have spent hundreds of millions of dollars lobbying against climate action and working to dilute international agreements, in addition to funding disinformation campaigns to cast doubt on the science around climate change. Such a problem does not exist in China, because its socialist system has broken the correlation between economic wealth and political power.
The Chinese president can say something that would be unthinkable in the West: “We will never again seek economic growth at the cost of the environment.” But, serendipitously, China has been able to leverage the advantages of socialism to achieve economic growth while simultaneously protecting the environment. Indeed the country’s orientation towards new productive forces – “high technology, high efficiency, and high quality” – is entirely consistent with the green transition, and it’s no accident that the most prominent of the new productive forces are renewable energy, electric vehicles and batteries.
According to analysis by Lauri Myllyvirta, lead analyst at Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air, clean-energy technologies made up more than 10 percent of China’s economy in 2024, and these sectors grew three times as fast as the Chinese economy overall, accounting for 26 percent of all GDP growth in 2024. This means that, while governments in the West justify inaction on climate on the basis that it would harm economic growth, China is the first country to make the green transition a powerful driver of economic growth, thereby addressing both the immediate needs of the Chinese people for modernisation and the long-term needs of humanity for a habitable planet.
Global significance
The foregoing indicates that socialism is the only viable political and economic framework for saving the planet.
Unfortunately, only a handful of countries are socialist, and the environmental crisis impacts the entire world. And the problem is sufficiently urgent that the world simply cannot sit back and wait for historical materialism to run its course.
Thankfully, the world can benefit from China’s leadership. China’s sustained investment and innovation in renewable energy has resulted in a global reduction in costs, such that in much of the world, solar and wind power are more cost effective than fossil fuels. According to the International Energy Agency, China’s huge investment in green energy has “contributed to a cost decline more than 80 percent, helping solar PV to become the most affordable electricity generation technology in many parts of the world”.
The countries of sub-Saharan Africa, for example, where half the population still lacks access to electricity, can now leapfrog fossil fuels and move straight to renewables, thanks to low-cost Chinese technology.
And for those of us in the advanced capitalist countries, where political power is dominated by a decaying bourgeoisie, China’s example can be used to help create mass pressure to stop our governments and ruling classes from destroying the planet, and to encourage sensible cooperation with China on environmental issues.
Mao Zedong said in 1956 that, by the beginning of the 21st century, China would have become “a powerful socialist industrial country” and that “she ought to have made a greater contribution to humanity.” China’s leadership in tackling the environmental crisis, and in building an ecological civilisation, is certainly a great contribution to humanity.
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